MoM: Proportion of Women Elected to European Parliaments.

The MakeoverMonday task for Week 9/2021 was to analyse a dataset provided by Eurostat, which measures the proportion of women in European national parliaments and governments. After a quick analysis in Tableau it soon became clear that despite over 100 years of participation in national politics, in many European countries, access to power was still much less than that of men. The average for Europe, in 2019, was that female representatives make up only 31% of the total, in national parliaments. In order to capture this imbalance I referenced some of the work by W. E. B. Dubois who created some groundbreaking data visualisations at the turn of the 20th century. The gauge charts, below the main bar chart, which show the percentage representation in each European country for 2019, are designed to reference a typical design of a parliamentary chamber.

Below is a visual created by W. E. B. Dubois in 1900 which provided some of the inspiration for this visualisation.

“Proportion of Freemen and Slaves among American Negroes”, 1900, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

As noted by Jason Forrest in this article on Medium, ‘The above chart is a masterwork of data journalism. It’s hard to look at the chart above and not feel like you’ve been kicked in the gut. The mountainous black area punctuated by the word(s) SLAVES sits immovable under a green ribbon that opens to the right of the chart.’ Jason Forrest: Jul 19, 2018.